Let Them Eat Stake: A Vampire Chef Novel (34 page)

He had a point. That this point made me squirm a little was really not Brendan’s fault.

“So, are you going to ask me to make sure my grandfather’s kept busy tomorrow night, or am I going to volunteer?”

“I’d rather you volunteered, because I’m already feeling pretty low right now.”

Brendan stood and crossed the short distance between us so
he could take both my hands. He ran his calloused thumbs over the backs and looked me right in the eye. “Charlotte, I think it’d be a good idea for me to make sure I know where my grandfather is tomorrow night while you, Chet, and Anatole are meeting with Henri. Besides, I’ve got a whole lot to talk to him about.”

“Okay. But, Brendan…you’ll be careful?”

“I know you don’t like him, Charlotte, but you don’t really believe my grandfather would hurt one of his own, do you?”

I thought about the cold menace that surrounded Lloyd Maddox when he spoke of protecting his family. He was a man used to power, and to making calculations that got people killed for what he considered just causes. He was also very used to deciding whom he considered human, and whom he considered a monster. I thought about what Jacques and Brendan both said about his fading power. “I don’t know,” I admitted. “So, promise me?”

“I promise, but you be careful too, Charlotte.”

“Brendan, my restaurant’s going to be reviewed by the
New York Times
. There is no way I’m missing that.”

We kissed, and he did that thing where he cupped my cheek and looked into my eyes. I did that thing where I got melty and scared at the same time. But it was totally worth it.

I like exhaustion. Exhaustion is a bully that shoves all other considerations out of its way and lets you fall straight into sleep. That I was in my own bed in my own apartment for the first time in what felt like forever only served to back Exhaustion up. I slept like a vampire at high noon.

Sometime after sunup, I stumbled out of my room and headed to the bathroom. I stumbled out again, with no thought in my head except dropping back into my bed and finding out where I’d left that last bit of sleep.

“Hold it right there!”

Of course it was Jessie, standing at the living room end of the hall, her arms folded. She was wearing an expression on her perfect face that could only have been inherited from an Old World nana seen on one too many bad days.

I could not begin to count the ways I didn’t need her or her inherited glowers just then.

“Don’t you have faces to paint?” I growled.

“It’s a slow week, and my roommate’s gotten herself tied up in a murder. Oh, wait, that would be
another
murder!” Jessie brandished her smartphone at me, and I saw the FlashNews app was open. The headlines glowed in screaming red, indicating vital updates of personal interest.

Of course, my name was going to be all over whatever those articles and videos were. I grabbed the phone out of her hand and thumbed the screen.

Celebrity Chef Oscar Simmons had been murdered. This was the word from an “anonymous source,” inside the Paranormal Squadron. I winced. Either Linus had a leak, or he had let that out to make the Aldens nervous. I knew which I’d bet on. But, of course, buried down below these facts was a bio on Oscar, and that bio included the tidbit that he’d recently “turned down” a lucrative appointment as catering chef for the upcoming Alden-Renault wedding. It also pointed out that the job Oscar turned down had been taken over by the infamous “Vampire Chef,” Charlotte Caine. From there, the links branched back to Nightlife, and all the news that we generated last year.

I sighed and handed Jess her phone back. I did not need to read a recap of how I got to be infamous. I’d been there and done that. My head was throbbing. I needed more sleep, and coffee, and possibly to turn myself over to witness protection. “I’m not tied up in it,” I told her firmly. “I’m just in close proximity to it.”

“Same thing.”

“It is not!” Damn. That six-year-old was just not going away. Fortunately, Jessie decided to ignore my feeble attempts at denial.

“Charlotte, this is serious!”

“I noticed, Jess.” I dropped onto our sagging green sofa. “Believe me, I’ve spent the better part of a week noticing how serious this is.” I looked around. “Where’s Trish? She hates to be left out of these conversations.”

“New client, early meeting.” Jess tucked her skirt under her as she sat in the wingback chair she’d inherited from her grandmother. “What are you going to do?”

“Try to keep Elaine from quitting on me, for starters,” I said. The rest, she did not need to know. I looked thoughtfully at my roomie. Jessie was a good person. She just lived
in another world, a bright daytime world that involved pretty colors and pretty smells.

Smells.
I straightened up. “Jess. Tell me about perfume.”

I’m not sure what she saw in my face just then, but it made her shrink back a little. “What? Why?”

“How’s it made? What do you need to do?”

“I’m a cosmetics consultant. What do I know about perfume?”

“It’s the beauty industry—you must know
something
.”

“And PepsiCo is the food industry, but you couldn’t tell me how to make a snack chip,” she shot back.

“I could probably get you close.” Not that I made a habit of eating prefab snack chips where anybody could see, but that was a separate issue.

“Really? How?”

“I’d taste it, look at it, take it apart…Jess, this has nothing to do with perfume.”

“Actually, it kind of does. I’ve got a friend; she’s setting up as a private aromatherapist…”

“That’s a thing?” My forehead wrinkled. I should not be trying to talk about this stuff before coffee. I headed for the kitchen.

“Expanding market too,” said Jess as she got up to follow me. “But she worked for Estée Lauder for a while. She says that when a new perfume comes out, the first, like, twenty bottles are all bought by the competition so they can take the fragrance apart and analyze it.”

This was not what I was expecting to hear. I was expecting to hear about chemicals and formulae, and stuff like that. This was way different, and it was leading my brain down all kinds of uncomfortable paths, all of which were leading to Karina Alden’s door at Exclusivité.

I made coffee, and then because I was, however reluctantly, awake enough for my stomach to complain about it, I found the eggs and cream in the fridge and set a pan on the stove to get hot.

Assume Karina had in fact wanted to get hold of the Arall so she could mass produce it. If that truly was the case, whether that production was for the military or the general market didn’t really matter. Assume her father had offered to pay to help get it for her…Assume Oscar had found out what she was doing and was taking meetings to decide which side of this disaster would pay him more money, depending on the information he’d acquired…and that was what had been in the notebook pages he’d shredded.

Except Karina wasn’t a witch. Even if she could have gotten hold of the Arall poison and taken apart the chemical component, she couldn’t have reproduced the actual potion. Her mother had destroyed the formula ingredients and clues before that faked ICE raid and the theft. But it wasn’t Karina who stole the gun. It was Henri, and he was busy with blackmail for an old murder, not new murders or weaponizing perfumes.

Except he also talked about setting up the Alden daughters—daughters plural. What if Henri had planned on framing Karina for the theft of the Arall? Maybe she was the one who’d wanted to talk to her father. Maybe she knew about Henri’s involvement with the theft. That was a real possibility. That left the question, though, of what Scott Alden was actually doing and what Oscar had really known that got him killed…

I whisked cream into eggs, and considered my pots of herbs on the windowsill.

“Incidentally, Charlotte?” said Jess.

“Yeah?”

“If you’re trying to distract me with breakfast, it’s not going to work. You need to figure out what you’re going to do.”

I knew what I was going to do. I also knew I wasn’t going to tell Jess, because I didn’t want to deal with the fit that would follow after. This meant I really was going to
have to distract her with breakfast. I rolled up my pajama sleeves and got to work.

Twenty minutes later we were both sitting down to fluffy piles of eggs laced with fresh basil and mozzarella and nicely crisped hash browns. Jessie forgot to ask me any more questions, and I was more than happy to let the food and trivial conversation reign.

At least it reigned until the door buzzer sounded. “Cripes,” muttered Jess around a last mouthful as she jumped up. “That’s Sheryl. We’ve got a meet-up. She’s early.”

But it wasn’t Sheryl. “I’m looking for Charlotte Caine?” Trudy’s voice crackled through the speaker grille.

“Right here, Trudy.” I came up behind Jess. “I’ll buzz you in.”

“What’s this?” Jess asked, and I instantly regretted not being dressed. I should have said I’d meet her in the lobby.

“Jess, if I swear I’ll tell you everything later, will you not ask any questions now?”

“No,” she said, “because you’ll put me off until I’ve forgotten what we were talking about. Or you’ll feed me. So, what’s up?”

“Jess,” I began slowly, “I really, really don’t want to lie to you.”

“So don’t.”

“Thanks, I won’t. I…”

Proving that sometimes the universe has excellent timing, Trudy knocked on the door right then, and I was able to turn away to let her in.

“Trudy, thanks for coming.” This was the first time I had seen Trudy out of uniform. Even off-duty, though, she wore black; black leggings and black slip-on flats and an oversized black shirt. Her hair was knotted at the back of her head, and her face was bare of makeup but full of worry.

I introduced Trudy to Jess. “We were just finishing breakfast,” I said. “Come on. I’ll get you a cup of coffee.”

Fortunately, Trudy was quick on the uptake and followed
me into the apartment’s tiny kitchen. Jessie might be nosy, but she hated to be seen looking nosy, in front of strangers anyway. So there was no way she could follow us. Her glare let me know she was conceding the round, but not for long.

“Here’s…what you asked for.” Trudy pulled a bottle out of her purse and set it on the counter.

“Thanks.” It was one of those travel-sized plastic containers for putting shampoo in to get it through security at airports. I tucked it into my bathrobe pocket and traded Trudy for a cup of coffee, feeling vaguely as if I’d just done a drug deal. In a way, I guess we had. I had no idea what the legality around possession of a love potion was. O’Grady probably could have told me. Now, why, oh, why didn’t that make me feel any better?

“Did you get hold of Pete?” I asked to get my mind off that thought.

“Who? Oh, your friend with the job. Um, not yet. I wanted to get this done first.” Trudy sipped her coffee, but was clearly not interested in it. “You’ll…You’ll be careful with that, won’t you? It’s the magic version of prescription meds. You shouldn’t take it if you don’t need to.”

“Got it.”

“Sorry, I can’t stay.” She put her mug in the sink, a reflexive reaction on the part of the professionally tidy. “I just…Look, thank you again,” she said. “For what you’ve tried to do. I do appreciate it.”

This sounded way more like a permanent good-bye than I was comfortable with. I shifted my weight a little, suddenly very sorry I didn’t know this woman better. “Trudy, are you okay?”

She smiled tightly across at me and lied. “Yeah. At least, I will be. I’ve got to go. Remember what I said about the potion.”

And she all but ran out of the apartment, straight past Jess without saying a word.

“Charlotte?”
said Jess. “What was that about?”

“Swear to God, Jess,” I said, fingering the bottle in my pocket as if the answer might be written in braille on the side, “I really don’t know.”

Fortunately for me, Jess’s friend Sheryl showed up a few minutes later, and my roommate had no choice but to leave me alone. I showered and dressed, and I drank another cup of coffee. Then, I called the Alden house, and, thankfully, got the voice mail. I put on my perky voice, such as it was, for the recording, saying Reese and I would be spending most of the day at Nightlife supervising the catering prep, and that I could be reached at this number if I was needed, and I’d be back on duty tonight. Somehow, with word of Oscar’s murder circulating on the Web, I didn’t think Adrienne Alden was going to squawk too loud about my not being there to make lunch. She very probably had other things on her mind right now.

I took out the bottle Trudy had given me and held it up to the light. The liquid inside was the pale amber color of weak tea. I tipped it back and forth. It was thick, a little thicker than maple syrup but not as thick as honey. I uncapped it and waved my hand over it, wafting some fumes toward me. I smelled…reality. It bit hard in the back of my nasal cavity, a startling feeling, like being shocked awake. If you wanted to sneak this past somebody, you’d need something strong to mask it, like scotch, or espresso or…

My thoughts stopped dead in their tracks, and I stared at the bottle—the one, lonely little bottle. Something was wrong here. Jacques and Anatole both had talked about how vampires weren’t vulnerable to the same magics humans were. If that was true, there should be two antidotes, shouldn’t there? One for Deanna and one for Gabriel.